Existing technology in the area of streetlight monitoring and control widely uses legacy methods where lights are turned on from a central location. City personnel generally do not have visibility into the working/non-working status of the streetlights and maintenance work may be inefficient since technicians may not be easily directed to fix broken lights.
To combat these problems, recent solutions have sought to establish two-way communication with each streetlight pole and to control the lights from control nodes using communication links with each pole. In one solution, the streetlights are divided into segments (for example, a segment may be defined as the lights on the same street) and a control node placed in a central location with respect to the segments controls the segments. Many different control nodes may be linked into a data network, either wired or wireless. In another solution, control nodes equipped with point-to-point Radio Frequency (RF) transmitters/receivers are deployed on streetlight poles. This solution relies on point-to-point RF links to establish a mesh-like network between a subset of streetlights that are located in the same general area. Certain nodes are defined as controllers and centralized commands are distributed through these nodes.